Hender cringed.
“Hender doesn’t like saltwater,” Nell said, joining them as the soldiers started breaking out their gear behind them. “Saltwater kills species from Henders Island. It’s why they never left.”
Abrams unbuckled himself from the XOS and started pulling packs off its back as Dima and Bear helped him.
Nastia held out her phone as she recorded video through the window in reverence. “The Urals were formed when Baltica, Siberia, and Kazakhstania smashed together to form the supercontinent Laurasia,” Nastia said. “That a cave system from that time could still exist…”
“I know,” Geoffrey said. “It’s unprecedented.”
“No, not unprecedented,” Nastia corrected. “The Jenolan Caves in Australia are three hundred forty million years old. But it is remarkably rare.”
“Saltwater?” Hender asked.
Nell patted one of his “shoulders” reassuringly.
“Why can you touch Hender and not Geoffrey?” Nastia wondered.
“Yes?” Geoffrey asked. “Why is that?”
“I can control nants,” Hender said. “But Nell can’t.”
“Nell?” Geoffrey gasped.
“I didn’t have any body armor, so Hender gave me his.”
He looked at her, terrified as he noticed the purple sheen of the nants coating her skin. “Are you OK? Is she safe, Hender?”
“Yes,” Hender said.
“I’m OK,” Nell said, shaking her head in amazement.
“That’s good … so you got your symbiants back, Hender?”
“Yes!” Hender said, flushing green and blue with pleasure.
“But why don’t they attack Nell?”
“They think she’s my child,” Hender said. “I’m pregnant, Geoffrey.”
Geoffrey opened his mouth. “Oh! Congratulations.”
“OK,” Hender said.
“Hey,” Abrams said. “Why can’t we unleash hell on those monsters? I mean, if there’s another window upstairs, why couldn’t we just blow it up and open the gates? Then they could duke it out down here.”
“That’s actually not a terrible idea, Abrams,” Geoffrey said. “Using one ecosystem against the other—”
“And if we blow the windows down here, too—” Nell suggested.
“Saltwater!” Geoffrey agreed.
“Brilliant,” Nastia said. “An Augean stables solution.”
“What’s that?” Dima asked.
“The Fifth Labor of Hercules,” Abrams said, impressed. “King Augeas commanded Hercules to clean out his stables, which he knew was impossible, but Hercules diverted two rivers into the stables and got the job done.”
“Right,” Nastia said. “That’s very good.”
“Thanks,” Abrams said. “We have enough explosives. If that lake is big enough, we could flood the whole damned city.”
“It’s big enough,” Geoffrey said.
“It probably wouldn’t drain more than a few feet and still flood Pobedograd,” Nell said. “So long as we plug the drain.”
Abrams nodded. “We’re working on that right now.” He reached up to one of the two snare drum-sized robots strapped onto the rack of the exosuit. He unclipped the ROV and set it on the floor before them on its four legs. “The Dalek combat robot.”
“Do you know how to work it?” Bear asked.
“Jackson said the dog whistle operates all of these, didn’t he?” Dima said.
“Yeah, it’s easy,” Abrams said.
“Can that make it through the tunnel with all those ghosts in there?” Bear asked.
“It can go twenty miles per hour, which may be fast enough to get by them.”
“How can we transmit radio signals to it through solid rock?” Geoffrey questioned, dubious.
“It drops a trail of remote signal relays—it should have, let’s see—” Abrams counted the detachable transponders on board the device. “—five. I should be able to set them to deploy every five hundred yards or so. That should be enough.” Abrams raised his eyebrows at them. “Let’s wake it up!”
He pressed the select button on the dog whistle, scrolled down to DALEK-1 and pushed START. Two rotors popped out of the unit and whirred in different directions, lifting the bot off the floor. It stopped before hitting the ceiling as though repelled by an invisible cushion and then hovered with a loud, high-pitched whine.
“Let’s see if the cameras work!” Dima shouted.
“Yeah, I see you!” Abrams yelled.
“OK, set it down. Maybe we can put a charge on it,” Dima said.
“Not one big enough to seal that tunnel,” Bear said.
“No. But big enough to detonate the charges already set in the tunnel,” Abrams said.
“If they were set,” Bear glanced sideways at Hender.
“Kuzu wouldn’t lie,” Hender said.
“He did lie,” Abrams said. “He said one of those octopus-things killed the other guys and then later he said Ferrell did it. One of those was a lie, Hender.”
“He would not lie to me,” Hender said sadly.
“Oh, great,” Bear said. “Kuzu is two moves from checkmating the entire human race, man! How do we know this one isn’t in on it?”
“I’m not Kuzu,” Hender said.
“Presuming he’s not,” Abrams said, “even if they didn’t set the charges, there’s a full pack of sixteen charges in that tunnel. If we can reach it and detonate the Dalek next to it, that should do the trick.”
“Da,” Dima said. “We have to try!”
“We’ll set a charge on the Dalek to go off in, say, seven minutes,” Abrams said, punching in the number. “That should give me enough time to find the charges in the tunnel and park this thing right there.”
“Sounds good,” Dima said.
“How can you steer it through the tunnel?” Nastia asked.
“Just like a video game.” Abrams pulled the dog whistle from around his neck. “I just point it where I want to go. It’s got wall avoidance sensors built in, so it can’t crash—theoretically.”
“Let’s do it,” Dima said.
“Hoo-ya,” Bear said.
“You guys rig the charges,” Nell said. “I’m going upstairs to check out the gondola.”
Bear glanced at Nell. “A lot’s riding on that gondola, darlin’.”
“I know!”
“Dima, why don’t you go with her?” Abrams said.
“Yeah, OK.” Dima nodded at Nell as she climbed the spiral stairs inside the glass vestibule. He caught up to her as Bear rigged the ROV with explosives.
“We can set some charges in the underwater bedroom as well as this window,” Geoffrey said.
“Hey,” Sasha objected. “That’s my room!”
“We need to, honey,” he said.
Sasha frowned.
“Can you show Bear where it is? And leave all the doors open, and open the door to the foyer, too, OK?”
“OK. Come on, Bear. Ivan and I will show you the way.”
“Nastia, come here and help me,” Abrams said as he revved up the Dalek.
“I’m worried about Kuzu,” Hender said.
“Then let’s go upstairs,” Geoffrey said. “We can check the security monitors there.”
01:16:10
Kuzu had located a camera view from inside the room with the underwater window where they had gathered. He had turned up the volume on Maxim’s laptop and heard every word they said.
He rose now and tossed the laptop onto the bed. He grabbed his backpack full of explosives. “Come now!”
Maxim gripped the pistol he had slipped into his pocket as he went with Kuzu to the limousine.
01:10:10
Nell and Dima reached the gondola deck one hundred feet up.
Dima peered through the window in the granite wall, inspecting the landing of the gondola. The car was a ’50s Soviet space-age shape encrusted with rainbowfire except for its windows, which had been kept relatively clean, perhaps by mollusks like those that scraped the underwater window and the walls of Sasha’s bedroom.
“That’s it,” Nell said. “It’s driven by a diesel engine. Cans of diesel fuel are stacked next to it—see?”
“Yes. So we have to make sure it’s fueled up and prime the engine. It probably hasn’t been started in sixty years.”
“They started it recently. At least I think so,” Nell said as she threw the switch that turned on the bank of floodlights above the window. They illuminated the gondola’s dual cables that curved down and then up across the lake to a pylon rising from a nearby island. The vast space beyond the floodlights was aglow with creatures, some of which loomed like pink blimps in the distance to their right. Firebombers flared as they rose and fell in slow motion, streaming vivid pink tails. Orange bubbles flowed in flocks, changing direction in unison. Vividly colored balls rolled down the walls, and hundreds of yellow and orange gammies leaped on their long legs past the window with alarming speed. Hordes of creatures writhed on the gray mats that spread across the surface of the lake, which was filled with glowing shapes like giant flowers and winding snakes.
“What do those words say?” Nell asked, pointing to the sign over the hatch.
“‘Hell’s Door,’” Dima muttered, looking at her.
“Ah.” Nell nodded. “It says ‘Hell’s Window’ downstairs.”
“Oh,” Dima said. “This gondola—it’s supposed to get us across that lake?” He frowned. “And then—where?”
Nell shrugged. “It must be another escape route for Stalin. We think it must lead out of the mountain.”
“We hope?” Dima shook his head. “Well, it better.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
Dima gazed out the window at the hellish world there. “I don’t know about that.”
01:10:10
Abrams and Nastia opened the hatch and he fired in tight circles down the passageway. The rounds scarred the walls, floor, and ceiling as they raked the tunnel. He targeted ghosts as they peeled off in the distance, blasting them to calamari as they dropped to the floor. Leaving nothing to chance, he used all but a few ammo magazines to clear the Dalek’s path as Nastia plugged her ears.
Bear returned with Sasha after setting charges on the crystal walls of her bedroom. Sasha immediately ran with Ivan upstairs to get away from the loud noise of the gunfire, and Bear began rigging the underwater window with Semtex.
01:07:34
Hender stepped off the stairs into Stalin’s conservatory and ran to look at the video monitors over Maxim’s desk.
Geoffrey limped behind him.
“Oh, nooo!” Hender quailed.
“What?” Geoffrey panted, hobbling forward with Stalin’s cane.
“Where is this one?” Hender pointed at the screen on the wall.
Geoffrey moved closer to look: a limo barreled past the gate of Sector Three. It turned right into Sector Two, heading north—toward the palace. “Oh, no,” he agreed.
Hender said. “Kuzu.”
“But he can’t get through that gate. It’s locked. Right, Sasha?”
Sasha was just coming up behind them with Ivan. “Right. Papa never guessed my password. He doesn’t know the door code.” She folded her arms and glared at the limousine on the monitor.
01:07:19
“Here goes.”
Abrams set the bot down in the secret passage and started it with the dog whistle. It hummed like a giant Henders wasp as it levitated. An accelerometer inside the remote transmitted tilt and trajectory commands to the flying bot as Abrams sent it forward. With the Dalek’s forward camera, Abrams could see the tunnel on the screen of the dog whistle as it cruised at twenty miles per hour, equally distanced from the ceiling, floor, and walls.
“Amazing!” said Nastia.
“Yeah, it’s cool,” Abrams said, pursing his lips as he focused.
Bear finished setting three charges on the window. “I set the charges in that girl’s room to go off in twenty minutes.”
“Good. Set the charges on the window to go off in ten minutes,” Abrams said. “I set the charge on the Dalek to go off in nine minutes, but that’s more than I’ll need.”
“Roger. Ten minutes it is.”
“Did you open that door to the foyer?”
“Shit, I forgot!” Bear set the timer on the detonator and trotted down the corridor to wheel open the hatch at the end. “Woo!” he yelled back. “Somethin’ died out here, man.” He came back into the room and looked over Abrams’s shoulder. “That’s pungent. Hey, I hope that spiger’s still stuck in the side tunnel. Remember?”
“I was just thinking about that.” Abrams frowned as he started dodging the first ghosts peeling off the walls and ceiling the Dalek passed.
01:05:40
“We need Abrams to go out there and start the engine,” Dima said. “Those gammies are too crazy, and he’s got the best body armor.”
“Maybe we should shut the lights off and turn them on just before we head out to the gondola,” Nell said. “That will temporarily blind the aggregators and firebombers, at least.”
“But not those freaking gammies,” Dima said.
She nodded. “Probably not them.”
“I’ll get Abrams.” Dima jumped down the stairs.
“I’ll check the security monitors,” said Nell, right behind him.
01:03:04
Abrams accidentally turned the Dalek off as it sped down the passageway, and it came down in a controlled landing. “Damn it!” He restarted it, mashing the button and getting it going again as a ghost dropped down behind it and blew sticky trails that fell just out of the propellers’ circumference. “That was close!”
The Dalek dropped a signal relay as Abrams tipped the controls forward, pushing it faster down the stone artery toward the railroad tunnel. Up ahead, he saw the spiger backing out of the side tunnel, one of its hind legs trying to pry it free. Abrams steered the Dalek toward the wall, and the bot’s radar sensed the collision and corrected its flight path, curving it perfectly around the spiger’s thrashing leg.
“Nice move!” Bear said, shuddering.
Abrams could see the open hatch and piloted the Dalek through, rising in a barrel roll as he dropped another signal relay and veered to the right down the train tunnel.
“Good luck, man!” Bear grabbed another demolition pack and headed upstairs, passing Dima on the way down.
“How is he doing?” Dima asked. “We need him upstairs.”
Bear shook his head. “He’s busy.”
Dima approached Abrams. “How long till you get there? We need you to get the gondola’s motor running.”
“OK. I’m in the tunnel now. You wanna do this?” Abrams asked. “My hands are tired.”
“It doesn’t look too hard.”
“Just set it down when you spot the charges in the tunnel. The fork should be coming up ahead. Just remember to go left. Here!” He handed Dima the dog whistle. “Do I need the XOS?”
“Whoa,” Dima said as he tilted the Dalek too far and its avoidance system repelled it from the wall.
“You sure you can do it?” Nastia asked.
“Da. Can you get up the stairs in that suit?” asked Dima.
“Hell, yes!” Abrams said, strapping in and firing up the exoskeleton. He charged up the stairs, taking them two at a time as they shook and swayed inside the glass vestibule.
Nastia watched Dima steering the bot. “Sasha should do it,” she said, cringing. “Kids are good at this sort of thing!”
“Don’t worry! I can do it. It’s actually kind of easy.… Ahh!”
01:02:27
Hender saw Bear enter the conservatory from the room below. Abrams passed him in the XOS suit, heading upstairs. Bear immediately started pulling out charges from a demolition pack and spacing them across Hell’s Window. “Better get upstairs, you guys,” he said. “Abrams is getting the gondola going.”
“Kuzu’s at the front gate!” Geoffrey said.
“Oh, shit,” Bear said, turning.
The others watched the monitor as the sel got out of the limousine with Maxim in front of the gate to Sector 1.
“Papa!” Sasha shouted angrily.
01:02:12
As the Dalek flew down the train tunnel, Dima noticed something glowing in the bot’s minimized rearview cam. He maximized the rear view and saw the spiger burst out of the secret passage and bound down the tunnel after the Dalek like a Labrador.
Dima tilted the controls and his whole body forward to pick up the bot’s speed in front of the leaping giant, whose one remaining eye was better than two human eyes as it bounded down the tunnel like a dog chasing a squirrel with trinocular vision.
01:01:01
Hender noticed that, outside the gate to Sector One, Kuzu was doing the same thing that Bear was doing. “Kuzu!” He pointed.
Nell saw that the sel was setting explosives on the gate. “He’s setting charges.”
“How does he know how?” Bear asked.
“He’s smart!” Geoffrey said.
“You better go upstairs and help Abrams, Bear,” Nell said.
“OK, but you better hurry. You’ve got six minutes to get your asses up there.” Bear set the detonator on the window and ran upstairs.
Nell turned up the volume as Kuzu approached the camera outside the gate. He rose up, his face before the camera, one baleful eye staring into it with three stacked pupils. Then he spoke, in his own language: “Shueenair Shenuday, come now with me. We will make this world our own. We will be remembered by all sels, forever.”
“Let me meet you at the gate,” Hender responded in Kuzu’s language. “Nell can unlock it. Let us talk, Kuzu.”
“Yes. Open. Good idea, brother.”
Hender gripped Nell’s hand, and she felt the symbiants tingle on her skin. “Will you help me, Nell?”
“How?”
“Come with me to talk with Kuzu.”
“Sasha, you better go upstairs now, honey,” Nell said.
“I’m scared!” Sasha cried. “What about Papa?”
“Sasha,” Hender said to her, his fur illuminating lavender and green.
Sasha stared at Hender, mesmerized.
“Go upstairs now, OK? We will help him,” Hender said.
Maxim appeared on the screen now behind Kuzu, looking up with huge, tragic eyes into the camera, and Sasha saw him. “You didn’t guess the password, Papa!” she shouted, weeping, running to the screen.
Maxim’s eyes were kind suddenly, and he smiled, finally seeing it. “I love Sasha,” he said. “That’s the password, Sashinka. Isn’t it?”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “You guessed it!” she shouted.
“Go with them, Sasha,” Maxim said. “Go with them now, Sashinka.”
“OK, Papa!”
“Hender and Nell will meet you at the door, Kuzu,” Geoffrey said.
“Good,” Kuzu said. “Come now!”
01:00:44
“All right. I’m going out there and am gonna take a look at that big bad engine.” Abrams put his helmet on and cranked the dog wheel. He and Bear pulled the hatch open. As it swung inward, Abrams went through and Bear shut the door behind him. Bear stomped on a gammy.
Through the window on the platform, Bear saw Abrams check the fuel drums. Gammarids flowed like roaches onto the platform around his feet and crawled over him, moving in short, nervous bursts. But they could not bite through the hard-shelled body armor. Abrams lifted the hood on the large diesel engine and scanned it for the fuel intake and carburetor, shaking his head. He reached down into the engine.
Bear saw Abrams give a thumbs-up and jump down. Grabbing a heavy drum of fuel, he uncapped it and tipped it into an intake tube. He emptied it and threw it aside, opening another. He was crawling with bugs, small and monstrously large, as he tipped the drum with the robot arms. With his own arm free, Abrams pulled a pistol from his shoulder harness and fired five times at the platform, killing five gammies for the rest to feed on.
01:00:43
Nell led Hender down the stairs outside the conservatory, leaving the hatch open behind them.
“Dead,” Hender said as they smelled decaying flesh.
As they crossed the arcade at the top of the stairs, they passed the corpses of two men.
“Yes, Hender,” she said, stifling her nausea as they rushed past the bodies.
They hurried down one of the grand staircases to the foyer. Hender saw the limousine parked at the bottom with two open doors. The smell of death was overpowering. There were more corpses below.
“How die?” Hender asked.
“They were trying to kill Geoffrey.”
“Geoffrey killed other humans?”
“Yes.”
They passed through the palace, past more bodies, to the curving steps that cascaded over the courtyard outside.
“Why did he have to kill them, Nell?” Hender asked.
“To save the people he loves.”
“I see, Nell,” Hender said with a low, faint voice.
They crossed the courtyard to the gate, and Nell reached out to the touch screen control panel on the left side. Glancing at Hender, she cued the gate open a few feet and then stopped it.
Kuzu and Maxim entered, along with a gust of Henders creatures that streaked through before Nell could close the gate.
The flying bugs, ants, and rats that got through immediately homed in on the rotting corpses, tearing and drilling into their flesh.
Kuzu stood in front of the gate, and Maxim, seeming small beside the purple and red sel now, crouched meekly at his side.
01:00:42
Dima righted the Dalek and tilted the controls with exaggerated motions to point it forward as he drove the flying bot at increasing speed before the driving spiger. He reached the fork as he saw the glowing form behind him grow closer in thirty-foot lunges. He took the left tunnel at the fork and pushed the bot forward as fast as it could go, while the spiger loomed huge in the image-stabilized rear view display.
Nastia gripped his arm. “It’s going to catch you!”
“How much time is left on the timer on that window?”
Nastia ran to the window and looked at the red digital readout. “Two minutes and forty-five seconds!”
“Go upstairs!”
“Will you make it?”
“Go!”
“No!”
00:58:51
“Come now, Shenuday!” Kuzu said.
“You can escape with us, Kuzu,” Hender said. “We can live with humans. They can live with us!”
“Now you lie, just like them!”
“There are good humans and bad humans! Kuzu!” Hender said. “Just like us.”
“Come!” Kuzu’s voice gunned like an engine, resonating in the courtyard. “This whole world can be ours. You must see it!”
“They saved our lives,” Hender said. “I love them, Kuzu.”
“Love humans?” Kuzu spit. “You make me sick!”
“There is no ‘sels’ or ‘humans,’ Kuzu.” Hender said. “There is only one and one and one. Don’t you remember? How we survived?”
“Remember, yes. I remember your kind never believed. That is why we almost died.” Kuzu trained both his trinocular eyes on Hender: “Die then!”
Hender turned to Nell. “Run!”
Kuzu turned to open the gate, and Hender leaped onto the larger sel’s back. Gripping all his limbs with his six hands, Hender tried only to thwart and neutralize his fellow sel as long as he could.
Meanwhile, Maxim stared at them, almost in a trance. Kuzu reached back with his upper arms, twisting Hender’s head as he tried to bite into Hender’s stretching neck.
Hender fended off his jaws with a hand that lost two fingers as Kuzu’s jaws clamped closed.
00:54:58
Dima waved the dog whistle through the air as the spiger snapped its jaws just to the left of the Dalek.
“Good!” Nastia cried, clutching his arm.
Dima looped the bot across the arching ceiling to the other side, thirty-five seconds from detonation.
He could not yet see the charges the men had set in the tunnel ahead stretching uphill into the endless gloom. As he rolled the bot in another spiral, the spiger leaped again, gaining another ten feet. The next leap would be enough, and he dodged to the right at the last second and then saw the charges wired across the tunnel’s ceiling. He killed the power and dropped the ROV just as the vertical jaws of the spiger swallowed the Dalek, and the signal went dead.
Dima stood frozen in dread.
“What happened?” Nastia said. “It didn’t work.”
Dima bowed his head, muttering a prayer.
A shock wave rumbled through the ground as the secondary explosion confirmed the target was destroyed. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Dima turned and squeezed Nastia in a crushing embrace. “We did it!”
He carried her toward the spiral stairs with twenty seconds to spare before the charges on the submerged window ignited and saltwater washed around them.
00:54:01
An explosion rumbled in the bowels of Pobedograd.
Kuzu overpowered Hender, driving him into the ground on his belly. His four hands bunched into a single fist to bring down on Hender’s head.
Maxim moved closer as they struggled. As Kuzu pummeled Hender’s horn with glancing blows, Maxim pulled out his gun. With shaking hands, he pressed the muzzle against Kuzu’s body, and he fired three bullets into the beast that had possessed him.
Kuzu twisted as he looked at Maxim, flushing yellow and red as blue blood spurted across his fur. “No!” he roared. He grabbed Maxim’s hand. “I told you, you would be safe with me!”
“Go to hell!” Maxim roared at the monster, condemning himself at the same time. And he knew that he had, in that moment, saved himself, too, somehow.
Another explosion reverberated.
Reeling from his wounds, Kuzu gripped Maxim, and the nants now turned. Maxim’s skin burned as his entire body was covered in blood. He screamed as the bones on his wrists appeared before his eyes. With a last effort, he squeezed the gun in his right hand three more times, firing the bullets into Kuzu before they collapsed together on the cobblestones of the courtyard.
Hender ran to Nell, who had waited on the steps for him. Another terrible explosion rolled through the ground beneath them, sending stalactite spears down from the ceiling.
Kuzu crawled toward the gate as he coughed blue blood. And lying on his side, he reached out with one long arm and touched the control panel, opening the gate wide.
A flood of Henders creatures stormed into the courtyard as water swept down the steps of the palace.
“Climb on my back,” Nell said, and Hender jumped on as the wave of water flowed around Nell’s legs. She carried Hender, who was much lighter than she’d expected, to the foyer and onto the staircase on the left, where Hender jumped off and both rushed up the steps. Two spigers and a column of rats raced behind them, skirting the saltwater pouring into the foyer from the left and lunging up the staircase opposite them. Nell and Hender reached the top first and ran straight back to the open hatch of the conservatory as a riot of gammies gushed out.
Hender grabbed Nell then and leaped through the hatch into the conservatory, reaching out two long arms and grabbing onto the chandelier. He swung to the next one with his long unfolding arms, past the shattered window as the creatures of Pandemonium stormed over the floor below them led by a giant soldier gammarid ridden by a ghost octopus that sprayed its sticky ropes at the spiger charging straight for it.
As the monsters locked in mortal combat, Hender and Nell reached the glass vestibule of the spiral staircase at the far corner. And as all hell broke loose around them, they hurtled up the stairs.
00:52:45
As the vast lake of Pandemonium drained into the palace, roaring down the passageway to the railroad tunnel and flooding through the gate into Sector Two, the burning water came up to Kuzu’s chest like acid. He saw a giant gammarid come down the stairs of the palace and spew its webs over the spiked arms of a leaping spiger. Then Kuzu saw the green glow of Henders wasps and drill-worms colliding with swarms of glowing orange orbs and tentacled balls in the air. For a moment, Kuzu was gratified, for he thought surely his world would prevail. And then, to his surprise, Kuzu died.
00:52:02
Nell and Hender reached the gondola station, and looking through the window, they saw the others already inside the swaying tram car as Abrams poured a last drum of fuel into the engine’s intake. Abrams waved them in.
Four or five gammarids skittered through the crack as Nell opened the door. Hender jumped, but instinctively reached out with four hands, swatting the squat, spiky creatures to the ground.
Nell turned the battery of bright lights on and off rapidly on the gondola deck. “Come on!”
They leaped through the hatch and crossed the momentarily cleared landing. The others opened the gondola’s door quickly to let them in. Below the gondola’s landing, they saw a great migration as creatures were funneling through the shattered window below.
Abrams, still on top of the gondola’s engine, hooked the battery cables to his last XOS battery and depressed the ignition plunger on the side. He primed, choked, and gunned the great engine until it finally turned over, coughing but running and then clearing its throat like a dragon before roaring to life. The heavy diesel motor had been well designed to run after sitting dormant. Slamming the hood, Abrams jumped down, unstrapped the XOS suit, and ran to the lever that engaged the bull wheel. “Here goes!” he muttered, throwing the latch.
The gondola moved out over the lake as he ran and jumped through the door as they closed it behind him.
The dangling tram glided down the cable into Pandemonium.
00:51:24
They silently watched the diaphanous apparitions and phantoms glimmering in the dark around them, praying that the tenuous thread from which they hung would not give way. They heard a cacophony of clicking sounds as sonar-sensing creatures avoided colliding with the gondola. Below they could see two fonts of air bubbles roiling the lake near the shore where water swirled down into the underwater breaches.
Abrams sat down on the bench that circled the tram’s interior, breathing heavily as he slumped in his stiff suit and petted Ivan. He cracked open the armor over his leg. His calf was swollen and bruised.
“How are you?” Dima asked.
“Hell, Jack Youngblood played the Super Bowl with a broken leg.” Abrams grinned and snapped the armor back on. “How much time before our eight hours is up and they drop a nuke in this place?”
Bear looked at his watch. “About fifty minutes.”
“It’s like fireworks out there,” Nastia observed.
“Yeah,” Geoffrey said. “Those floating jellyfish shower bioluminescence over the man-of-wars.”
“Why?” Nastia asked.
“Maybe to attract larger predators,” he said. “Deep-sea organisms do the same thing to turn the table on their enemies.”
“Ah!” Nastia gripped the holds on the gondola with white-knuckled hands, shivering.
Dima put his arm around her shoulders.
Abrams looked out of the window behind them. “So far, so good,” he said.
Nastia noticed a large, glowing sea serpent swimming on the lake below. It broke into pieces that attacked a large squidlike creature illuminated by blue and green sparkles of light.
“Aggregators,” Nell said. “They swim, too.”
“Oh! They’re dreadful! What are those huge eight-pointed stars?” Nastia asked, pointing at a shape under the water that opened like a giant water lily.
“A mega-medusae,” Nell said. “Here.” She handed Nastia a leather-bound book from her pack. “Trofim Lysenko’s journal. Why don’t you take it? He describes dozens of Pandemonium species.”
Nastia took the book. “Thank you! So he was here! Does he mention my grandfather? Boris Kurolesov?”
Nell smiled. “I don’t know. We can’t read it.”
Nastia held it to her breast and sighed. She looked excitedly back out the window. “What are mega-medusae?”
“They live on the bottom of the lake,” Geoffrey said.
“We think it’s a medusa that is devoted to producing several kinds of offspring, some of which attack predators lured by the chum it releases from time to time. Her children sting and paralyze meals for her, which sink into her maw,” Nell said.
“Nell spotted one that must be thirty-five feet wide,” Geoffrey said.
“Incredible!” whispered Nastia, videoing as much as she could now with her phone as the gondola reached its lowest point over the lake and began climbing higher.
Hender looked with wide eyes in all directions, holding on to the gondola with all six hands. The idea of dangling over saltwater was terrifying enough without the water being filled with horrible monsters.
“What’s that stuff glowing on the ceiling?” Abrams said.
The entire roof and walls of the cavern, as well as patches on the surface of the lake, glimmered emerald, turquoise, crimson, and green.
“Rainbowfire,” Nastia said. “Right, Nell?”
“Yes,” Nell said. “We think it’s related to foxfire, a glowing fungus that grows on rotting wood in forests. Otherwise known as will-o’-the-wisp or fairy fire. The glow is caused by an oxidizing reaction of luciferase with luciferin that emits light.”
“Aristotle was first to describe it, I think,” Nastia said, using her night vision glasses to scan the growth that seemed to burn like embers all over the cavern walls. “In Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Tom use foxfire to light their way while digging a tunnel.” She smiled.
“It seems to be the base of the food chain here,” Geoffrey said. “That and the patches of growth on the surface of the lake.”
“Maybe that’s why so many species glow!” Nastia said.
Ivan whined and jumped up, standing over Sasha’s lap and barking out the window. Sasha sat next to Hender, resting her head against the shifting patterns of his fur that soothed her sadness. “What are these flying things that look like butterflies?” Sasha asked, pointing a finger at one that had stuck on the window next to her head. It looked like a pink balloon with wide transparent wings around a deflating bladder of flesh. Three fangs gnawed at the glass in its amorphous mouth.
“I call them nudibats, Sash,” Nell said. “I think they’re some kind of flying nudibranch-like mollusk that uses a heat-producing chemical reaction to fill an air sac and rise like little hot air balloons.”
Nastia videoed them with her phone.
“This place is crazy,” Bear said. “Where the hell are we going? Does anybody know?”
As he said it, the gondola rocked, jarring them forward and backwards as it passed the first pulley, which hung from a structure fixed to a giant stalagmite on the island. They started sinking lower again on the other side, deeper into the haunted darkness.
“You say this cave is a hundred kilometers long?” Nastia said.